PHILADELPHIA, PA, The Penn Libraries catalog, Franklin, now provides access to 2 million downloadable public-domain books and serials available through the HathiTrust Digital Library. With the addition of these digitized volumes, the number of e-books available through the Penn Libraries has reached 3.2 million titles.

“The Penn Libraries are always looking for creative ways to provide access to new resources for the Penn community,” shared Carton Rogers, Vice Provost and Director of the Penn Libraries. “By providing access to these 2 million HathiTrust titles, we substantially increase the research content available to the Penn community through Franklin.”

HathiTrust is a partnership of more than 90 major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. The Penn Libraries became an institutional partner in 2010. The content preserved by HathiTrust has been digitized by partner libraries as part of Google Books, Internet Archive, and in-house digitization projects and comprises over 12 million volumes containing over 4 billion pages.

The number of online, public-domain titles is expected to continue increasing. The HathiTrust reported on their website that “Several publishers, including the university presses of Michigan, Utah State, and Duke have agreed, at least in principle, to open backlist titles through HathiTrust.”

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About the Penn Libraries
The Penn Libraries serve the world-class faculty and students of Penn’s 12 schools. The Libraries’ collections comprise more than 7 million volumes, over 100,000 journals, some 2 million digitized images, and extraordinary rare and unique materials that document the intellectual and cultural experience of ancient and modern civilizations. Through our collaborative relationships, we supplement Penn’s great local collections with physical access to the Center for Research Libraries (approximately 5 million items), the combined holdings of the Ivies (more than 70 million volumes), and exclusive electronic access to some 2 million public domain titles in the HathiTrust. Today, the Libraries play an instrumental role in developing new technologies for information discovery and dissemination and are noted for groundbreaking work in digital library design. To learn more about the Penn Libraries, visit http://www.library.upenn.edu.